Hi, everyone. It’s been a while.
I’ve started writing this update a few different times because I wasn’t really sure how to come back after being gone for so long. I didn’t want to just suddenly start posting again and act like I hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth, but I also didn’t want my first post back to feel overwhelmingly serious.
I’ve missed writing. I’ve missed this blog, these stories, and honestly just having a little corner of the internet where I can throw all of my strange ideas and obsess over fictional psychopaths in peace.
A lot has changed since I was last properly active here, both in my life and in the way I feel about my writing. I have quite a bit I want to talk about, including where I’ve been, what things are going to look like going forward, and a pretty big announcement regarding Charmed by Shadows.
But before all of that, I just want to say thank you to everyone who stayed, checked in, reread my work, sent messages, or simply forgot I existed but happened to still be following me when I crawled back out of the void.
I’m really happy to be back.
The very short version is:
Which is a sentence that sounds way more dramatic than I want this section to feel, but that is genuinely what happened.
My living situation became unstable, I ended up without a safe place of my own for a while, and writing very quickly stopped being something I had the energy to focus on.
For a long time, most of my attention was going toward very basic things: figuring out where I was going to stay, getting through work, trying to save money, handling whatever problem had decided to appear that week, and just generally keeping myself afloat.
So if you ever wondered why I disappeared so suddenly or why updates became so inconsistent, that’s basically the answer.
I’m in a much more stable place, I have a home, and my life finally feels like something I can actually build instead of something I’m constantly trying to survive.
Things aren’t magically perfect, obviously, but I’m safe, I’m settled, and I finally have enough room in my brain to start missing the things I actually enjoy again.
And one of those things was writing.
I don’t really want to turn this post into a giant explanation of everything that happened. Maybe I’ll talk about some of it separately one day, maybe I won’t.
For now, I mostly just wanted you guys to know that I didn’t disappear because I stopped caring about this blog or because I secretly abandoned all of my stories.
Life just got very, very loud for a while.
Now for the much happier part:
My life is a lot more stable than it was when I disappeared, which means I actually have the space to be creative again.
I’m not trying to write chapters while also wondering where I’m going to be living next week or dealing with a new crisis every five minutes. That alone makes coming back to this blog feel completely different.
That being said, I don’t want to come back and immediately trap myself in some ridiculous update schedule that makes writing feel like another job.
If I promise you guys a chapter every Friday at exactly 7:32 p.m., eventually Friday will come around and I’ll be staring at my laptop like it personally ruined my life.
What you can expect is more consistency from me.
There will probably still be weeks where I’m busy, tired, distracted by another project, or simply don’t feel like writing. I’m still a person with a life outside of this blog, and sometimes my brain is going to decide that writing is absolutely not happening that day.
But a quiet week doesn’t mean I’ve vanished again.
I also really want to let myself have fun with this blog again.
That means stories, character posts, random ideas, little extras, answering asks, rambling about whatever fictional man currently has me by the throat, and generally using this place for what I originally made it for:
There may be times when I bounce between projects instead of focusing exclusively on one story.
There may be ideas I change my mind about.
There may be things I start experimenting with simply because they sound fun.
Basically, I’m giving myself permission to create without turning every post into an obligation.
And speaking of changing my mind about things…
There is one very large change I need to talk about.
Which brings us to Charmed by Shadows.
the charmed by shadows announcement
I’m rebooting Charmed by Shadows.
Not editing a couple of paragraphs.
Not quietly fixing some typos and pretending nothing happened.
I mean a genuine rewrite from the beginning.
The current version of Charmed by Shadows is going to become the original/legacy version of the story. It will no longer be considered canon to the new version going forward.
I haven’t fully decided yet how long I’ll leave the original chapters available while I work on the rewrite, but I do want to make the transition as clear as possible so nobody is wondering which version they’re supposed to be reading.
The new version will still be called Charmed by Shadows, and anything from the original version that survives will be rewritten into the new canon.
And when I say “reboot,” I don’t mean I’m throwing away absolutely everything.
The core premise is still here.
A lot of the characters, relationships, scenes, themes, and bigger ideas I love are still going to exist.
But I’m rebuilding the story around them.
Characterization is changing.
Y/N is getting a much stronger identity outside of being “the girl Toby is obsessed with.”
Toby’s attachment is going to develop much more slowly instead of immediately jumping into full-blown devotion.
The stalking and horror elements are going to have more time to build.
Some plot points are being expanded, some are being completely reworked, and some are probably getting tossed into the void where they belong.
So for anyone who has already read the original: yes, there will be familiar pieces.
But I really don’t want this to feel like you’re rereading the exact same story with slightly nicer sentences.
There will be new scenes, different interactions, changed motivations, new buildup, altered lore, and probably entire stretches of the story that look completely different from what was originally posted.
Think of the old version less like something I’m “fixing” and more like the first draft of the story I actually want to tell now.
I know this is a pretty big change.
Which is probably why I should explain why I’m doing it.
This is probably the part I’ve gone back and forth on the most.
When I first came back to Charmed by Shadows, my plan was simple:
Finally continue the story.
And then I actually reread it.
There are parts I still love.
There are scenes I’m proud of.
There are ideas I absolutely want to keep.
I can even see where my writing started improving as the chapters went on.
But as a whole, the story doesn’t feel like something I want to continue anymore.
There are pacing issues that bother me. Plot holes I never noticed before. Character choices that don’t make sense to me now. Things happen too quickly.
Some ideas feel underdeveloped, some feel forced, and some are just not what I want this story to be anymore.
The biggest thing I realized while rereading was that I was spending more time thinking,
“How do I fix this enough to keep going?”
than actually feeling excited to write it.
This blog was never supposed to feel like an obligation.
I made it because I love writing.
I made it because I wanted somewhere to put all of my weird ideas, all of my dramatic little scenes, all of the obsessive nonsense that lives in my head that I don’t really have anywhere else to put.
That was the whole point.
And somewhere along the way, having readers made me start feeling like I had to preserve things just because people had already read them.
Like changing too much would somehow be unfair.
Like I needed to keep pushing forward even if I didn’t like where the story was going anymore.
But that isn’t why I started this.
I’m incredibly grateful that people read my work. Genuinely.
The fact that anybody cares about these stories at all is still kind of insane to me.
But I also have to remember that this is still my creative space.
If I force myself to keep writing a version of Charmed by Shadows that I actively dislike just because I’m scared people won’t want to reread it, then I’m turning something I love into homework.
And I don’t want to do that.
I’d rather take everything I’ve learned since writing the original, keep the pieces I still love, throw out the things that no longer work, and build something that actually makes me excited to sit down and write again.
Maybe some of you won’t want to reread it.
Maybe some people will prefer the old version.
But I think I owe it to myself to make the story I actually want to make.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
Just doing some rebuilding.
I think that’s everything.
Thank you to everyone who stayed, everyone who checked in, everyone who read quietly from the sidelines, and everyone who somehow still remembers this blog after all this time.
I’m really grateful you’re here.
But more than anything, I’m excited.
Excited to make things without feeling like I’m dragging myself through them.
Excited to take Charmed by Shadows apart and rebuild it into something I genuinely love.
This feels like a new chapter for me in a lot of ways, and I think I want my writing to have one too.
So here’s to fresh starts, better stories, and apparently still being emotionally attached to the same homicidal fictional man after all these years.
